When they swung round the great bend of the Rhone, and Vienne came in sight, Tommy uttered a cry of exultation. “Oh Clementina, let us stay here for a week!”
When they stood an hour afterwards on the great suspension bridge that connects Vienne with the little town of Sainte-Colombe, and drank in the afternoon beauty of the place, Tommy amended his proposition.
“Oh Clementina,” said he, “let us stay here for ever!”
Clementina sighed, and watched the broad blue river sweeping in its majestic curve between the wooded mountains from whose foliage peeped a myriad human habitations, the ancient Chateau-Fort de la Batie standing a brave and mutilated sentinel on its dominating hill, the nestling town with its Byzantine towers and tiled roofs, the Gothic west front of the Cathedral framed by the pylons of the bridge, the green boulevarded embankment and the fort of Sainte-Colombe in its broader and more smiling valley guarded, it too, by its grim square tower, the laughing peace of the infinite web of afternoon shadow and afternoon sunlight. Away up the stream a barge moved slowly down under a sail of burnished gold. A few moments afterwards coming under the lee of the mountains, the sail turned into what Tommy, who had pointed it out, called a dream-coloured brown. From which it may be deduced that Tommy was growing poetical.
In former times Clementina would have rebuked so nonsensical a fancy. But now, with a nod, she acquiesced. Nay more, she openly agreed.
“We who live in a sunless room in the midst of paint-pots, know nothing of the beauty of the world.”
“That’s true,” said Tommy.
“We hope, when we’re tired, that there is such a place as the Land of Dreams, but we imagine it’s somewhere east of the sun, and west of the moon. We don’t realise that all we’ve got to do to get there is to walk out of our front door.”
“It all depends upon the inward eye, doesn’t it?” said the boy. “Or, perhaps, indeed, it needs a double inward eye—two personalities, you know, harmonised in a subtle sort of way, so as to bring it into focus. You see what I mean? I don’t think I could get the whole dreamy adorableness of this if I hadn’t you beside me.”
“Do you mean that, Tommy?” she asked, with eyes fixed on the Rhone.
“Of course I do,” he replied, earnestly.
Her lips worked themselves into a smile.
“I never thought my personality could harmonise with any other on God’s earth.”
“You’ve lived a life of horrible, rank injustice.”
She started, as if hurt. “Ah! don’t say that.”
“To yourself, I mean, dearest Clementina. You’ve never allowed yourself a good quality. Now you’re beginning to find out your mistake.”
“When it’s pointed out that I can harmonise with your beautiful nature!”
At the flash of the old Clementina, Tommy laughed.
“I’m not going to deny that there’s good in me. Why should I? If there wasn’t, I shouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have asked me to be your companion,” he added quickly, fearing lest she might put a wrong construction on his words. “When a good woman does a man the honour of admitting him to her intimate companionship, he knows he’s good—and it makes him feel better.”
Her left elbow rested on the parapet of the bridge, and her chin rested on the palm of her hand. Without looking at him she stretched out the other hand and touched him.
“Thank you for saying that, Tommy,” she said in a low voice.
Their mutual relations had modified considerably during the journey. The change, in the first place, had come instinctively from Tommy. Hitherto, Clementina had represented little to his ingenuous mind but the rough-and-ready comrade, the good sort, the stunning portrait-painter. With many of his men friends he was on practically the same terms. Quite unconsciously he patronised her ever so little, as the Prince Charmings of life’s fairy-tale are apt to patronise those who are not quite so charming or quite so princely as themselves. When he had dined with the proud and gorgeous he loved to strut before her aureoled in his reflected splendour; not for a moment remembering that had Clementina chosen to throw off her social nonconformity she could have sat in high places at the houses of such a proud and gorgeous hierarchy as he, Tommy Burgrave, could not hope, for many years, to consort with. Sometimes he treated her as an old family nurse, who spoiled him, sometimes as a bearded master; he teased her; chaffed her, laid traps to catch her sharp sayings; greeted her with “Hullo,” and parted from her with an airy wave of the hand. But as soon as they set off on their travels the subtle change took place, for which the fact of his being her guest could only, in small degree, account. Being in charge of all arrangements, and thus asserting his masculinity, he saw Clementina in a new light. For all her unloveliness she was a woman; for all her lack of convention she was a lady born and bred. She was as much under his protection as any dame or damsel of the proud and gorgeous to whom he might have had the honour to act as escort; and without a moment’s self-consciousness he began to treat Clementina with the same courteous solicitude as he would have treated such dame or damsel, or, for the matter of that, any other woman of his acquaintance. Whereas, a month or two before he would have tramped by her side for miles without the thought of her possible fatigue entering his honest head, now her inability to stroll about the streets of these little provincial towns, without physical exhaustion, caused him grave anxiety. He administered to her comfort in a thousand ways. He saw to the proper working of the shutters in her room, to the smooth opening of the drawers and presses; put the fear of God into the hearts of chamber-maids and valets through the medium of a terrific lingua franca of his own invention; supplied her with flowers; rose early every morning to scour the town for a New York Herald so that it could be taken up to Clementina’s room with her coffee, and petit croissant. His habit of speech, too, became more deferential, and his discourse gained in depth and sincerity what it lost in picturesque vernacular. To sum up the whole of the foregoing in a phrase, Tommy’s attitude towards Clementina grew to be that of an extremely nice boy towards an extremely nice maiden aunt.
This change of attitude acted very powerfully on Clementina. As she had remarked, it was a new sensation to be taken care of: one which she liked very much indeed. All the sternly repressed feminine in her—all that she called the silly fool woman—responded to the masculine strength and delicacy of touch. She, on her side, saw Tommy in a new light. He had developed from the boy into the man. He was responsible, practical, imperious in his frank, kindly, Anglo-Saxon way. It was a new joy for the woman, who, since girlhood, had fought single-handed for her place in the world, to sit still and do nothing while difficulties vanished before his bright presence just as the crests of alarming steeps vanished before the irresistible rush of the car.
Once when a loud report and the grinding of the wheels announced a puncture, she cried involuntarily.
“I’m so glad!”
Tommy laughed. “Well, of all the feminine reasons for gladness!”—Clementina basked in her femininity like a lizard in the sun. “I suppose it’s because you can sit in the shade and watch Johnson and me toiling and broiling like niggers on the road.”
She blushed beneath her swarthy skin. That was just it. She loved to see him throw off his coat and grapple like a young Hercules with the tyre. For Johnson’s much more efficient exertions she cared not a scrap.
Her heart was full of new delights. It was a new delight to feel essentially what she in her irony used to term a lady; to be addressed with deference and tenderness, to have her desires executed just that instant before specific formulation which gives charm and surprise. Every day she discovered a new and unsuspected quality in Tommy, and every evening she dwelt upon the sweetness, freshness, and strength of his nature. The lavender fragrance, the nice maiden-aunt-ity of her relations with Tommy, I am afraid she missed.
It gave her an odd little thrill of pleasure when Tommy propounded his theory of the perfect focal adjustment of the good in their natures. When he implicitly gave her rank as angel she was deeply moved. So she stretched out her hand and touched him and said “Thank you.”
“You said nothing about my proposal to stay here for ever,” he remarked, after a while.
“I’m quite ready,” she replied absently. “Why shouldn’t we?”
Tommy pointed out a white chateau that flashed through the greenery of the hill behind the cathedral.
“That’s the place we’ll take. We’ll fill it with books—chiefly sermons, and flowers—chiefly poppies, and we’ll smoke hashish instead of tobacco, and we’ll sleep and paint dream-pictures all the rest of our lives.”
“I suppose you can’t conceive life—even a dream-life—without pictures to paint in it?”
“Not exactly,” said he. “Can you?”
“I shouldn’t be painting pictures in my dream-life.”
“What would you be doing?”
But Clementina did not reply. She looked at the brave old sentinel fort glowing red in the splendour of the westering sun. Tommy continued—“I’m sure you would be painting. How do you think a musician could face an existence without music? or a golfer without golf?” and he broke into his fresh laugh. “I wonder what dream-golf would be like? It would be a sort of mixed arrangement, I guess, with stars for balls and clouds for bunkers and meads of asphodels for putting greens.” He suddenly lifted his hands, palm facing palm, and looked through them at the framed picture. “Clementina dear, if I don’t get that old Tour de la Batie with the sunset on it, I’ll die. It will take eternity to get it right, and that’s why we must stay here for ever.”
“We’ll stay as long as you like,” said Clementina, “and you can paint to your heart’s content.”
“You’re the dearest thing in the world,” said Tommy.
Dinner time drew near. They left the bridge reluctantly, and mounted the great broad flight of forty steps that led to the west door of the Cathedral. A few of the narrow side streets brought them into the Place Miremont, where their hotel was situated. In the lazy late afternoon warmth it looked the laziest and most peaceful spot inhabited by man. The square, classic Town Library, hermetically closed, its inner mysteries hidden behind drawn blinds, stood in its midst like a mausoleum of dead and peaceful thoughts. Nothing living troubled it save a mongrel dog asleep on the steps. No customer ruffled the tranquillity of the shops around the Place. A red-trousered, blue-coated little soldier—so little that he looked like a toy soldier—and an old man in a blouse, who walked very slowly in the direction of the café, were the only humans on foot. Even the hotel omnibus, rattling suddenly into the square, failed to break the spell of quietude. For it was empty, and its emptiness gave a pleasurable sense of distance from the fever and the fret of life.
It is even said that Pontius Pilate found peace in Vienne, lying, according to popular tradition, under a comparatively modern monolith termed the Aiguille.
“Are you quite sure this place isn’t too dead-and-alive for you?” Clementina asked, as they approached the hotel.
He slid his hand under her arm.
“Oh no!” he cried, with a little reassuring squeeze. “It’s heavenly.”
While she was cleansing herself for dinner, Clementina looked in the glass. Her hair, as usual, straggled untidily over her temples. She wore it bunched up anyhow in a knot behind, and the resentful hair-pins invariably failed in their office. This evening she removed the faithful few, the saving remnant that for the world’s good remains in all communities, even of hair-pins, and her hair thick and black fell about her shoulders. She combed it, brushed it, brought it up to the top of her head and twisting it into a neat coil held it there with her hand, and for a moment or two studied the effect somewhat dreamily. Then, all of a sudden, a change of mood swept over her. She let the hair down again, almost savagely wound it into its accustomed clump into which she thrust hair-pins at random, and turned away from the mirror, her mouth drawn into its old grim lines.
Tommy found her rather uncommunicative at dinner which was served to them at a separate side table. At the table d’h?te in the middle of the room, eight or nine men, habitués and commercial travellers fed in stolid silence. She ate little. Tommy; noticing it, openly reproached himself for having caused her fatigue. The day in the open air—and open air pumped into the lungs at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour—was of itsel............